Digital goods, also referred to as digital content, includes images, electronic books “e-books,” audio recordings, video recordings, computer applications, and other forms of information transferable over a communication network such as the internet.
As described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,364,595, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by this reference, transfers of digital goods between users, as well as content providers and users, may take many different forms including a sale, a rental, a gift, a loan, a trade, etc. The problem identified in U.S. Pat. No. 8,364,595 is that copies of digital goods are easy and inexpensive to make, which can lead to repeated transferring of a digital good without the right to use the digital good. That is, users copy and distribute digital goods without the legal right to copy and distribute and, just as importantly, the recipients of the copies lack the legal right to use the copies.
As stated in U.S. Pat. No. 8,364,595, a secondary market in digital goods is economically efficient since users may own legitimate copies and transfer that legitimate copy to another user without running afoul of copyright law. The solution presented in U.S. Pat. No. 8,364,595 is to create an electronic marketplace that acts as the “middleman” in any transfer of a digital good. In essence, U.S. Pat. No. 8,364,595 discloses creating a personalized data store or digital locker for each user. Upon receiving a request to transfer a digital good from one user to another, the marketplace transfers the digital good from the transferor's digital store to the transferee's digital store and deleting the digital good from the transferor's digital store.